Britain is seven years into a prolonged period of fiscal consolidation, in which constraints on public spending have been the central feature and are set to continue for some years to come. According to figures supplied by the Institute for Fiscal Studies, “post 2010 ‘austerity’ is on course to be the longest pause in real-term spending growth on record.” This already demonstrates that the austerity faced by the working class in Britain today is not just a result of instability in the economy caused by Brexit[1]. In fact the ruling class always has a contingent excuse for any worsening in the economy, so that the last decade of austerity has been presented as the ‘recovery’ phase from the credit crunch of 2008. In this article we will show how today’s austerity measures are nothing but the continuation and worsening of a policy that has been carried out by politicians of left and right over five decades in order for the capitalist class respond to the historic crisis in their system. And this has been an international phenomenon.

The reality of the present attacks

The fact that the NHS would face a bed crisis this winter was well known in September, with NHS England noting hospitals planned to open 3,000 and free up a similar number to cope. However a BMA report shows that roughly 150,000 beds have been lost over the last 30 years, roughly half of them the general and acute beds needed for emergency admissions[2]. The Nuffield foundation estimates that spending on the NHS needs to grow by 4.3% a year to cope with an ageing population till 2022/3, but based on figures supplied by the ONS (Office for National Statistics) it will only grow by 0.7%, and in the coming year, 2018/9, it will grow only 0.4%. Of course, a cash-starved NHS also means attacks on the workers in it, who have not only been expected to do more with less, but are also among the 1.3 million public sector workers subject to a pay freeze or 1% cap since 2010 – a severe pay cut in real terms. The chancellor announced last November that this would be ended for nurses only.

The current government was elected on a manifesto that pledged to cut £12 billion from the welfare bill. Freezing working-age benefits until 2020, originally announced in 2015, will save an estimated £4.2 billion or 6%. The IFS (Institute for Fiscal Studies) estimate this will put 470,000 more people into poverty. But the government is also making cuts elsewhere to achieve its target reduction. Bringing support for individuals on ESA (for the sick) into line with the JSA rate (for the unemployed) which applies to all new claimants from April 2017 is expected to save £640 million by 2020–21. These days our rulers like to call this a ‘reform’, which is exactly the opposite from the reforms which the working class could fight for in the 19th Century, measures that improved conditions for the whole working class such as the 10 hour day and then the 8 hour day. The latest such measure is Universal Credit, which is being rolled out to replace working age means-tested benefits, both for those in and out of work, including those on low incomes with families, the sick, unemployed and carers. This comes with a 4 week delay in payment and the possibility of imposing tough sanctions, or cuts in payment, for those deemed not to be trying hard enough. Cuts to the family element, no longer paid beyond the second child, will make more savings. These welfare cuts “contribute to an outlook for income growth over the next four years that sharply increases inequality. The combination of plateauing employment growth, a renewed pay squeeze across the economy and sharp benefit cuts create the prospect of falling incomes in the bottom half of the distribution and the biggest rise in inequality since the final Thatcher term.”[3]

One indication of how the crisis of capitalism is hitting an area is unemployment – capital can only make a profit by exploiting workers, so the unemployed mean lost profit. If you look at the official unemployment figures based on those claiming jobseeker benefits you would be led to think it had fallen to 785,000 or 4.3%, better than at any time since the 1970s. However, if you add in those who are seeking and available for work and those parked on incapacity benefits the number rises to 2.3 million[4], with the young particularly badly hit. Also we know that many jobs today are low paid, precarious and often zero hours contracts, so that those in work can be little or no better of than the unemployed. Unemployment started to rise at the end of the post-war boom in the late 1960s, but really took off at the end of the 70s (when it rose to around a million under a Labour government) rising to more than 3 million in the 80s (under the Thatcher government). At that stage the figures were massaged when millions were pushed onto incapacity benefit, a tactic that continues to be used today.

We see cuts in services, such as the NHS, pay frozen or below inflation rises, benefits frozen or cut, persistent unemployment, and insecure jobs, which overall adds up not just to an increase in inequality but specifically a decrease in the share of wealth going to the working class.

Austerity, the response to the economic crisis by governments of left and right

As we have seen, austerity did not start with Brexit, nor with this Tory government, the previous coalition, or even Margaret Thatcher. It was the response of capital from the very start of the world economic crisis at the end of the 1960s, and included the ‘Social Contract’ brought in by a Labour government in the 1970s to limit wage rises at a time of high inflation. With each new development in the crisis there have been new austerity measures and a great deal of continuity between governments at this level. So the Blair government was elected in 1997 on a promise of keeping to the spending plans of the previous Tory government, and brought in various attacks that were often called “Tory cuts” by those who wanted to pretend that a Labour Party could or should behave differently in office. However the Blair and Brown governments attacked the NHS, causing job losses in the interest of efficiency, and cuts in beds as we have seen, and also brought in benefits cuts described as the ‘New Deal’.

In the run up to the 2010 election, the Conservatives promised more of the same.

“In addition, Labour's flagship ‘New Deal' back to work programme is to be scrapped by the Tories and replaced with more ‘personalised' help, which will include benefit cuts for those unwilling to take part in whatever spurious training they are made to undergo. On the other hand, Labour has said that ‘People out of work for more than six months who have turned down work experience, support or training will be required to take a work placement as a condition of receiving their benefits.’ It's not for nothing that the Work and Pensions Secretary, Yvette Cooper, noted (apparently without any sense of irony) that the Tories ‘are simply rehashing Labour policies...’..”[5]

This continuity is no accident: it is because both parties hold office in a capitalist state, one which works in the ‘interests of the nation’, i.e. the ruling class. This remains true despite democratic elections, and also when governments spout a left wing rhetoric. So we should not be fooled into thinking that the Labour Party led by an old left wing ‘rebel’ would be any different, as we saw last June when it refused to rule out freezing benefits, because it was important to overcome the state debt, but promised to keep defence spending at 2%.[6] “Ooooh Jeremy Corbyn” leading the Labour Party would be no better than the similarly radical-sounding Syriza government in Greece which in 2015 went ahead with the very austerity measures that had been rejected by a referendum it called.

The working class cannot defend its conditions by relying on any elected government, whatever it promises, nor on any union or campaign, but only on its own struggle, its unity, and its solidarity. 

M and A, 2.2.18

We are publishing an article written by the US communist group Workers’ Offensive (www.workersoffensive.org [8]) which offers a welcome critique of the “identity politics” which is gaining strength around the globe, and which, as we examine in another article in this issue, was behind the recent split in the UK Anarchist Federation.  Basing itself on a solid class standpoint and the analyses of past revolutionaries like Rosa Luxemburg, it shows how today’s identity politics serves to channel the real discontent stirred up by exacerbated racial oppression towards bourgeois political goals and institutions, and argues that only the broadening and deepening of the class struggle can overcome the many divisions that class society and capitalist social relations have imposed on the exploited (WR).

 Racial identity politics within the United States have historically assumed one of two forms: integrationism and black nationalism. The integrationist view was most eloquently espoused by Frederick Douglass. It sought to eliminate racial barriers to upward social mobility by reforming the dominant social, political, and economic institutions within capitalism to be inclusive of black business and professional elites, as opposed to just their white counterparts. The black nationalist perspective, whose best-known exponent was Marcus Garvey, was much more skeptical concerning America’s ability to accommodate racial diversity within the ruling class. Its proponents argued that blacks should build their own independent political and economic enclaves within American cities, with many in the movement calling for blacks to return to Africa.[1] Both integrationist and nationalist ideologies were predicated on notions of elite spokesmanship that made black workers into the wards of ‘their’ capitalist class. This principle is encapsulated in the politics of “symbolic representation”, in its various iterations, according to which parity between social groups can be determined by measuring the degree of elite representation within the halls of power.[2] Alternatively, it has been referred to as an “elite-brokerage” style of politics. Within this framework, the diverse and often conflicting interests of blacks, which are primarily dependent upon their class positioning, are subsumed under the heading of homogeneous racial interests, with black capitalists, predictably enough, speaking on behalf of an empirically non-existent black community.[3] In short, in spite of their superficial differences, both integrationist and racial separatist (i.e., nationalist) perspectives share many assumptions that are apologetic to the existing capitalist social order. It shall be the aim of the present essay to prove the inadequacy of identity politics for liberating blacks within the United States from racialized oppression and to provide, in broad outline, a roadmap for their emancipation and that of all oppressed peoples.

 The idea of the right of nations to self-determination entered public discourse in earnest when then-US president Woodrow Wilson issued his Fourteen Points towards the end of the First World War. Long before that, though, the ‘national question’ had been a subject of fervent discussion, not only among the most ardent defenders of capitalism, but also the international socialist movement. Rooted partly in the experience of the American and French revolutions, but also the major social upheavals that took place between the mid-19th to early 20th centuries, this theory holds that a nation, or group of people sharing a cultural identity, has the right to detach itself from an alien political body and decide for itself the manner in which it is to be governed. Naturally, this postulate appealed to the weak among the capitalists. Subordinated economically with respect to the dominant factions and effectively excluded from political power, they saw in it the opportunity to advance their position within capitalism by capturing the state apparatus. However, it also found a great deal of support among socialists, who feared that their mass movements would collapse from under them and workers would flock to the capitalist parties if they did not prostrate themselves before the delusions of the masses. Only a few within the Socialist International took a principled stance against the shameless opportunism of its leadership concerning the question of nationalities. The left-wing of the socialist movement, whose foremost representative was Rosa Luxemburg, rejected the right of nations to self-determination as a bourgeois myth and reasserted the validity of the core Marxian concept of class struggle.

 Nations, according to Luxemburg, are abstractions whose existence cannot be asserted through factual means. They do not exist as internally homogeneous political entities because of the contradictory interests and antagonistic relations between the social classes that comprise them. Hence, as Luxemburg explains, “there is literally not one social area, from the coarsest material relationships to the subtle moral ones, in which the possessing class and the class-conscious proletariat hold the same attitude, and in which they appear as a consolidated ‘national’ entity.”[4] But nationalism is not simply an artificial thought-system propagated by the ruling class to keep the exploited masses subjugated under their rule. Rather, like all other ideologies and political theories, it is rooted in socioeconomic realities and historical processes. To be more specific, nationalism was the ideological implement through which the ascendant European bourgeoisie rallied the poor peasantry and the proletariat in its struggle to overthrow (and replace!) the feudal nobility. It was likewise with race, a category with no scientific basis whatsoever, since the current extent of our species’ biological diversity is far too superficial to merit differentiation into distinct racial categories, but which served nevertheless as an ad hoc justification for the transatlantic slave trade and colonialism, both of which were vital to capitalist primitive accumulation.[5] Therefore, the function of race in the American context is rather comparable to nationalism in 18th century Europe. As Adolph Reed explains, these ideologies, “help to stabilize a social order by legitimizing its hierarchies of wealth, power, and privilege, including its social division of labor, as the natural order of things.”[6]

 The institutionalization of the racialized division of labor in the United States, which was quite profound historically and has assumed the form of slavery, racial segregation, and ‘post-racial’ structural racism successively, makes the American context unique in a few significant ways. For instance, whereas in other countries, racially and ethnically delineated labor pools have historically been incorporated into capitalism as a particularly vulnerable segment of the working class that can be subjected to intensified forms of exploitation, i.e., surplus-value extraction, black workers in the United States are disproportionately impacted by the structural unemployment that capitalism naturally produces. Their status as a surplus or excess population – ‘excess’ only in the sense that they cannot be profitably employed by capital – can be attributed in large part to their historical exclusion from the formal economy, and particularly those sectors experiencing the highest growth, which some have identified as the source of their relative underdevelopment.[7] Instead, the majority of black workers live in a chronic state of unemployment or under-employment and have been affected more than any other subsection of the US working class by the tendency towards the casualization of employment that has flourished under neoliberalism. It is precisely this dismal state of affairs which racism seeks to rationalize. Hence, racialist thought plays a dual function in modern-day capitalism: 1) it helps channel groups of people into certain occupations and allows for the maintenance of a reserve army of labor that can be deployed during periods of heightened capital-expansion; and 2) it sows divisions within the ranks of the workers and ideologically binds them to ‘their’ exploiting class.[8]

 Since racism is grounded on the economic substructure of society, it logically follows that its abolition will not be brought about by the exploiting class or political movements led by it. The self-anointed leaders of the so-called ‘black community’, who purport to be mediators between this idealized collectivity and the majority-white political establishment, are deeply embedded in capitalist production relations and therefore complicit in the reproduction of racism. These ‘black brahmins’, as Manning Marable famously referred to the professional-managerial stratum (a layer of society that includes clergy, politicians, and middle-class professionals), are little more than professional poverty pimps, opportunistically riding the wave of black proletarian discontent to achieve political prominence and riches for themselves.[9] The most recent manifestation of this phenomenon is an activist network in the United States that calls itself ‘Black Lives Matter’, which has become synonymous with the movement against racialized police violence, a clear-cut example of capitalists and their lackeys co-opting the authentic resistance of black workers. This organization, whose ties to the Democratic Party-NGO complex are fairly well-established at this point, attempts to harness the explosive spontaneity of the proletarian element within these social movements, which often takes the form of riots and looting, into forms of engagement with the capitalist system that do not interfere in any way with profit-making.[10] It is unsurprising, therefore, that their manifesto reads like the DNC platform, but with demands for reparations and investment into black-owned businesses, which effectively amounts to income redistribution for black capitalists, thrown in for good measure. Black Lives Matter are modern-day Garveyites, only they have traded in the overt homophobia and misogyny of the latter for hollow social justice rhetoric that throws a veneer of radicalism over their essentially capitalist politics.

 For reasons that we have already explored here, the capitalist class and its allied strata, all of whom are materially invested in the preservation of the existing social order, are incapable of putting forward a suitable response to anti-black racism in the United States, much less to the generalized barbarism of this society. Therefore, a solution to the profound social, economic, and moral crisis that capitalism presents at this juncture rests with the large segment of humanity dependent on the sale of its labor-power. In the American context, the creation of a multi- gendered, national, racial, etc., working-class front uniting all those who, while not equally disempowered, share a fundamental relationship to the economy, will be instrumental to abolishing capitalism and its attendant hierarchies. To this end, all forms of identity politics, which espouse collaboration between exploited and exploiting classes, and thereby compromise the success of workers’ struggle for emancipation, must be firmly opposed. It is not, however, enough to oppose identity politics; socialists must actively address non-class forms of oppression, detailing their foundations in capitalism and explaining how a socialist society will do away with them.

 It is true, for example, that within the United States blacks are murdered by police at a rate that is more than twice their percentage within the general population, while whites and Latinos are killed at a rate that is roughly proportional to their share of the population. However, it is important to note that more than half of all those killed by police are white. Moreover, in states with very small black populations, the percentage of blacks killed by police is many times smaller than the national average, which suggests that although anti-black racism is an important factor in police killings, it is clearly not the principal one. In fact, empirically speaking, the most reliable predictor of whether a person is likely to be murdered by police is not their race, but their class. More than 95% of all police killings are concentrated within neighborhoods where the median annual household income is just under $100,000, while the median annual household income in most neighborhoods where police killings occur in general is just over $52,000.[11] Police killings are not, then, a mechanism for establishing and reproducing white supremacy, but rather white supremacy is a system for maintaining the domination of capitalists over workers, regardless of the race of either one. Or as Adolph Reed succinctly explains, “the pattern in those states with high rates of police killings suggests […] that it is the product of an approach to policing that emerges from an imperative to contain and suppress the pockets of economically marginal and sub-employed working-class populations produced by revanchist capitalism.”[12]

 Recent developments in the class struggle within the United States are cause for careful optimism, since they reveal a willingness on the part of some workers to organize themselves in order to press their demands collectively against the bosses, independently of institutional (Democratic Party) and institutionalized (labor unions) organizations that actively discourage such behavior and openly stifle these attempts. The recent wave of illegal and non-union (i.e., wildcat) strikes by workers in the logistical and service industries, many of which have been multiracial due to the displacement of a large segment of the general working population into low-waged and low-skill labor over the last few decades, is a sign that something is potentially brewing beneath the surface.[13] With each successive struggle, workers in the United States learn for themselves that they have more in common with one another than not. Sadly, this emergent wave of militancy has been confined to a handful of industries and it has not yet spread to the whole class. Although still in its infancy, these experiences have greater transformative potential than all the consciousness-raising and leftist proselytizing in the world. The material imperatives of the class struggle impose themselves on the consciousness of social actors as an objective barrier impeding any further progress. Thus, for example, if white and male workers believe that they are inherently superior to black workers or to women, then they will make no attempt to organize with them, and their resistance will be crushed by the bosses all the same. For it is the class struggle itself that challenges people’s most deeply-held beliefs about the world and each other, and which draws the lines of battle within the workplace between workers and capitalists. In other words, the very process of putting together a solidaristic movement – that is, a social movement that unites all those who are exploited under capitalism – also works to actively undermine the various ideologies employed by the system to fortify and stabilize itself.  E.S., October 13, 2017

 

Faced with the growing dissension within the ruling class, and the Tory party in particular, in response to negotiations around Brexit, it is useful to take a step or two back and examine the historical roots of some of these divisions. The two articles published on this page both aim to show that the divisions are not merely the result of Brexit, but derive from the decline of British imperialism over a far longer period. The article ‘Britain: the ruling class divided’ is part of a longer piece published online  (https://en.internationalism.org/international-review/201712/14546/united-states-heart-growing-world-disorder [14]) which also emphasises that sharpening divisions within the capitalist class are a product of the present phase of the historic and world-wide decline of capitalism – the phase of decomposition in which the watchword of the ruling class has increasingly become “every man for himself and the devil take the hindmost”. The other piece, written by a close sympathiser, looks at the symbolic use of the figure of Winston Churchill in order to understand the increasingly delusional world view of parts of the British ruling class. 

To mark the 50th anniversary of the struggles of '68, the ICC is holding a public meeting to discuss the meaning of these events.

Saturday 9th June, 11am-6pm 
The Lucas Arms 254A Grays Inn Road, London WC1X 8QY

 

Morning Session: The events of May '68, their context and significance

Fifty years is as far away from today as the Russian revolution was to the events of 68. That’s why it will be necessary to recall the broad outlines of what actually happened in May-June, from the agitation in the universities to the ten-million strong strike wave. At the same time, we will try to place these events in their broader international, and above all historical, context: before 68, the international scale of a new generation’s questioning of a society which breeds racism and war, together with growing signs of working class discontent faced with the beginnings of a new economic crisis. In the wake of May 68: an international upsurge of workers’ struggles which signalled the end of a long period of defeat and counter-revolution, and the emergence of a new milieu of revolutionary political organisations.

Reading material

‘May 68 and the revolutionary perspective’, in International Reviews 133 and 134; see the online dossier ‘Fifty years ago, May 68’, https://en.internationalism.org/international-review/201804/15127/fifty-... [18]

 

Afternoon Session: The evolution of the class struggle since 1968

Just as the five decades prior to May 68 were marked by definite periods in the balance of class forces – a period of open revolutionary struggles followed by a period of deep counter-revolution – so the period opened up by 68 also needs to be analysed in its overall characteristics and not simply as a series of particular struggles. Broadly speaking, we can say that the period 1968-89 was marked by waves of class struggle which contained a potential for massive and even decisive class confrontations; but also that the failure of these movements to develop an explicitly revolutionary perspective, coupled with the bourgeoisie’s own inability to enlist the proletariat for another world war, ushered in the current phase of capitalist decomposition which has produced further difficulties for the working class. This part of the meeting will then look at the potential for the working class to overcome these difficulties and finally realise the revolutionary hopes raised by the events of May 68.

Reading material

21st ICC Congress: Report on the class struggle, International Review 156, https://en.internationalism.org/international-review/201601/13787/report... [19]

22nd ICC Congress: Resolution on the international class struggle, International Review 159, https://en.internationalism.org/international-review/201711/14435/22nd-i... [20]

This is an opportunity for debate among all those groups or individuals who want to develop a better understanding of the past, present and future of the proletarian struggle. All are welcome!

 

 

 

The British Labour Party harbours antisemites, leading to what the Chakrabarti Report in June 2016 called an “occasionally toxic atmosphere”. Furthermore this is a longstanding and somewhat intractable feature of the party, continuing despite the recommendations of the report 2 years ago, despite Corbyn meeting with the Jewish Leadership Council and Board of Deputies in April, which they described as a missed opportunity, and despite the fact that is has caused problems in recent local elections in areas with a large Jewish population. On the day of the royal wedding, the Labour Party chose as one of its three new peers Martha Osamor, who had signed a letter two years ago defending those accused of anti-Semitism.

This aspect of the LP should not surprise us. It is a party belonging to the capitalist class, and antisemitism is deeply embedded in capitalism (see https://en.internationalism.org/icconline/201605/13931/labour-left-and-j... [21]). And, as we showed two years ago, “It is well known that Corbyn has developed links with Hamas and Hizbollah, and his allies in the Trotskyist movement, after years of supporting Arafat or other factions of the PLO, have raised slogans like ‘we are all Hizbollah’ at demonstrations against Israeli incursions into Lebanon. It is here that anti-Zionism indeed becomes indistinguishable from antisemitism. … Hamas has referred to the Protocols in its programme to prove that there is a world Zionist conspiracy. Hezbollah’s leaders have talked of ‘throwing the Jews into the sea’. Corbyn and the Trotskyists may disapprove of these excesses, but the essence of national liberation ideology is that you make a common front with the enemies of your enemy. In this way, the left becomes a vehicle not only of a more shamefaced antisemitism, but of its most open manifestations.”

The existence of antisemitism is, however, not sufficient to account for the campaign about it. Whether the media make a scandal of something, or whether it is hushed up, often depends on the divisions in the ruling class and the need to put pressure on a politician or a government. So while Kennedy’s affairs were always hushed up, Clinton’s with Monica Lewinsky was publicised and led to impeachment proceedings which we analysed at the time as due to divisions over imperialist policy in the Far East, and whether to play the China or the Japan card. As leader of the opposition Corbyn has faced fairly sustained pressure, including campaigns about the antisemitism in the party two years ago and again today, a vote of no confidence by the Parliamentary Labour Party and a new leadership election after the referendum. To understand why all this is happening, we need to see what role the Labour Party plays for British capital.

What does the Labour Party do for capitalism?

Often called a ‘broad church’, the Labour Party has different wings that play a greater or lesser part in the various functions it fulfils for the state. Often they loathe each other, but somehow the Labour Party is hanging together much better than the Socialist Parties in France or Spain that have lost much of their influence to the more left wing France Insoumise and Podemos. Ever since the Party and the trade unions were definitively integrated into the state during World War One, Labour’s first responsibility has been to provide a safe means for the working class to express discontent within capitalism, and to monitor that discontent through the unions. This is its unique task, and it is carried out at all times, not just during periods of heightened class struggle as in the period between 1968 and 1989, but also in periods with low levels of class struggle as today, and even in periods in which the class has been defeated as in the 1930s and 1940s. Jeremy Corbyn is clearly on this wing of the Party, a politician who has often been seen on picket lines and demonstrations, and like others on the left of the party has often expressed views that are not wanted in government. For instance his views on unilateral nuclear disarmament, which he has conveniently dropped following a vote by the Party.

The other main role played by the Labour Party from the first half of the 20th century is as a credible party of government, either to ensure the main parties alternate in government to give credence to democracy, or in exceptional circumstances in coalition, as in World War Two. When the ruling class is in control of its political apparatus this works very well for it. In the 1980s the UK, like much of western Europe with the notable exception of France, put the right wing parties in power to impose austerity and privatisation, and the left in opposition to control the wave of class struggle going on at the time. The left wing Michael Foot became leader of the Labour Party and however unpopular Margaret Thatcher’s government became, she kept winning elections. When the Labour Party was no longer needed in opposition a different sort of leader, Tony Blair, was elected.

Brexit, populism and the bourgeoisie’s political difficulties

Two surprises have resulted in Corbyn finding himself as Labour leader and prime minister-in-waiting, both of which highlight the bourgeoisie’s political difficulties. First, and most disastrously for British capital, the Tory Party felt the need to offer a referendum on EU membership in its manifesto for the 2015 election, both because of the divisions on this issue within the party and because of pressure from UKIP. The narrow vote in favour of Brexit was unexpected, and has thrown the bourgeoisie (Tories and Labour) into confusion because of the deep divisions on the issue and the fact that there was no agreed policy on what Brexit would mean.

While the UK bourgeoisie has always had Eurosceptics in both major parties, it has been able to cope with this difference until faced with the current wave of populism. This development of populism, the anti-elitist anger that has led to the election of Trump in the USA and the growth of the Front National in France, expresses the decomposition of capitalism and not any struggle against it. It is therefore a hindrance for the development of working class struggle as well as causing problems for the ruling class.

Similarly, the LP had its leadership election after its defeat in 2015. Corbyn was not expected to win, but was put on the ballot paper so that left wing views would also be represented in the campaign. However, he proved attractive to many Labour Party members and many new members who joined in order to vote for him, swelling the ranks of the party. Nevertheless, he was considered unelectable and it was expected that if he lasted until the next election, Labour would lose disastrously and he would be gone. However, he was a good lightning rod for discontent and anger, particularly among the young, and the Labour Party did much better in the 2017 election than expected. The result was that the PLP, which had only recently voted no confidence in him, was partially reconciled to put up with his leadership for the time being. The new media campaign on antisemitism shows this is no longer the case.

On the one hand, as the Economist, 19.5.18, put it, “the prospect of a far-left government led by Mr Corbyn and Mr McDonnell is not the joke it might have seemed 18 months ago. Labour deprived the Conservatives of their majority in a general election last year. Polls now have the opposition snapping at the heels of the flailing Tories, who are hopelessly bogged down in Brexit negotiations.”

On the other hand, Corbyn has been expressing views that are generally acceptable only in a back bencher, not a leader of the opposition, let alone a prime minister-in-waiting. First of all his expression of doubts about Russia’s responsibility for the poisoning of former spy Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia, and secondly his lack of support for the missile attack on Syria following a gas attack on civilians. This has reminded the main factions of the ruling class just why they do not trust him as a potential PM: “he has voted against every military action proposed by the UK government during his 35 years in Parliament. He is also firmly opposed to air strikes in Syria in response to chemical attacks, arguing that it will escalate tensions…” (https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-43737547 [22]).

It is precisely this issue that makes the campaign about antisemitism perfect as a means to pressurise Corbyn. It hits him on his links with Hamas and Hizbollah, and with his Trotskyist supporters, and is intended to weaken this wing of the Labour Party and to induce the leader to distance himself from it. It is also something that a party that claims to oppose all forms of racism cannot openly tolerate.

The Labour Party is from top to bottom and from left to right a party of capitalism. It is always ready to take the reins of government, impose austerity and pursue Britain’s imperialist policy. There is nothing to be gained from supporting one wing against the other.  Alex, 19.5.18 

This article was written by a comrade of the ICC who works at a UK university and took part in the recent UCU strikes. Although not in the UCU or even eligible to join the pension scheme at the centre of the dispute, the comrade joined the strike in solidarity.

In February 2018, the University and College Union (UCU) launched industrial action across the university sector in the UK. The strike was called over attempts by Universities UK (UUK)[1] to reduce the benefits members of the University Superannuation Scheme (USS), the pension scheme for academics and professional staff in the Higher Education section. The employers have claimed that this reduction in benefits was necessary to tackle the large deficit that the scheme is accruing.

The cuts are significant, with the headline figure suggesting an ‘average’ academic would lose £10,000 annually from their pension.

This is especially the case in my institution[2] where militancy is weak. Staff are divided into three unions:

·          UNISON covers lower graded administration and manual workers (porters, cleaners, etc.). This would be my natural home, were I unionised.

·           Unite covers technical staff.

·           UCU covers academic and ‘professionally’ graded administration staff.

Only a minority of staff are unionised and those outside are generally apathetic. Unison is chronically weak, having been on strike only once in all the time I’ve been there. Unite seems a bit more militant but, again, I’ve only ever known them to go on strike once.

UCU has a far more militant rhetoric (albeit only by comparison) and has its main support in the academic community.

A new militancy

In general, HE strikes are small and demoralising affairs, token efforts involving one or two-day actions. Any more is practically a revolution in comparison. Turnout at pickets is limited – many workers cross the picket line or stay at home, cut off from one another.

In contrast, this action was announced for 14 days over 4 weeks. This essentially meant giving up three weeks’ pay over one, possibly two, pay packets – a considerable loss for even the better off workers, but an eye-watering sum for the growing layer of low-paid, casualised staff in both administrative and academic functions[3].

In previous strikes, the local branches have had to scrape together picket rotas in order to maintain a minimal presence. This time, the first days of action on 22nd and 23rd February produced pickets of around 150 at the main entrance. Other entrances had smaller – between 10 and 20 – but still lively gatherings.

Originally, the union had planned a picket on only the first day or so. The branch leaders were visibly astonished by the turn-out and quickly moved to organise further pickets for the rest of the week. Every strike day saw a picket and although numbers fluctuated, the main entrance always managed to attract a minimum of around 50 picketers, even during the arctic winds of the “Beast from the East”[4].

The picketers were mainly drawn from the academic staff, with support functions a clear minority. There were also notable differences in turnout between disciplines, with arts, humanities and social sciences far more strongly represented than technical subjects.

Numbers were augmented by a significant number of students that joined the picket, rejecting calls from the administration to go to their lectures as normal. The student composition largely followed that of the picketers, being weighted towards non-technical disciplines. The local “Socialist Students” society joined the line, setting up pop-up food tables.

Further evidence of how the local branch had completely underestimated the support for the action was evident at the post-picket rally on 22nd Feb. They had booked a small room at the local community centre. This filled up almost immediately, resulting in another, more spontaneous, rally taking place outside, essentially creating two meetings.

Motivating factors

Everyone I spoke to was surprised at the turnout. Many people had never been on strike before or had experienced only small actions supported by a hard-core. In the early days, there was a real sense of euphoria as hundreds of people gathered in common purpose, made new friends both personal and professional and aired common grievances.

There was a real sense of anger and betrayal over the pensions issue. Over the years, staff have accepted a series of cuts to the pension scheme, often following demoralising small-scale industrial actions. Having already accepted significant cuts, the employers are back for more. But, more important, there was a general sense that the attack on pensions is only the latest in a series of continual attacks on academic freedom, low-pay, casualisation, ever more regimented working environment, increasing dictatorial control from the centre, impossible workloads[5], etc. It cannot be denied that some of this can be explained as the revolt of a layer of workers that has previously enjoyed an almost petit-bourgeois level of autonomy in their working lives, resisting increasing proletarianisation.

However, the younger academics and students never experienced those halcyon days – their education has been an experience of continued testing, growing financial pressure, and an uncertain job market. Early-career academics now face particularly harsh conditions. The rise of casual working among students has a broader impact. Exposed to the harsh reality of dead-end jobs, they quickly come to see academic success as the only path to escape. The pizza delivery shift serves as a warning of their likely future should they fail their degree, not to mention the emotional weight of debts in the tens of thousands.

Naturally, debt slavery and naked exploitation is the lot of most working-class children who ‘fail’ in the current education system, and we should not forget that working-class students are still ‘privileged’ in comparison to workers of the same age. But, in some ways, the intellectual stimulation of a degree contrasted with the brutal world of work, combined with the ideology of ‘employability’, is even worse as it teases these young adults with the possibility that they might have a better future.

Where once Higher Education was about training the future bourgeoisie, these days it is more about feeding the capitalist machine with high-skilled labour. The most intelligent and ideological tractable are pushed towards a career with the large corporations, the more independent towards the cult of the entrepreneur and the start-up. The rest are destined to become fodder for low or middle ranking administrative functions, call centre work, and the like, and many not even that.

Small wonder that students’ mental health conditions have deteriorated steadily. Declarations of mental health problems among students have increased around 500% in the last decade, while suicide rates have risen by 56%. As poorly resources support services struggle to cope, students now have a higher risk of suicide than the general population[6].

Although the issue of pensions was the spark that lit the fire, the underlying nature of the strike was really a revolt against the alienation of the education system, the modern workplace and society itself, a revolt against social decomposition.

The creativity of the struggle

In response to these underlying issues, the strike was accompanied by a series of “teach-outs” that attempted to articulate a need for something different. These ranged from efforts to formulate an alternative foundation for the University system run on democratic lines, to celebrations of strike-poetry by the English department, lectures on the growth of casualisation and much more.

Much of this was, unsurprisingly, dominated by academic and leftist ideology. The ‘enemy’ was repeatedly framed as ‘neo-liberalism’ rather than capitalism, and the emphasis was on trying to find solutions within the capitalist system. Building strong unions, varying forms of Keynesianism, Jeremy Corbyn, etc. were all seen as offering, if nothing else, some sort of relief from being engulfed in the current effluent of society. To a large extent, however, the meetings were dominated by what could best be described as a cry of torment, tempered by rage, as people shared their experiences of life in the capitalist education system.

Nonetheless, the fact that the struggle impulsed an effort by students and workers to create a space where issues can be discussed shows the hunger for discussion growing within this sector. In particular, it shows that a new generation of workers, for all its confusions around identity politics, etc. is not simply willing to passively accept the increasingly brutal attacks launched against it[7].

On a more practical level, there were also attempts to overcome the nature of the strike itself. As mentioned above, the financial penalty for supporting the strike in its entirety was too much for some workers. But, instead of simply crossing the picket line, they decided to strike on random days, reducing the financial penalty but also maintaining disruption by making it impossible for bosses to predict who was going to turn up when.

Academics also began to withdraw external examiner support for institutions that attempted to intimidate strikers; with the result that many institutions abandoned the hard line they had taken and became much more conciliatory towards striking workers. Threats of disciplinary action were replaced with cloying “acknowledging your strong feelings”.

Students also launched occupations at several institutions, waging a highly effective campaign on social media that further helped dissolve the moral authority of the employers. It’s difficult for the powers that be to maintain credibility when students denied access to toilets post pictures of bottles of urine online and female students lament the anatomical difficulties of filling bottles!

The union strikes back

As the strike progressed into March, the employers’ front appeared to be crumbling. One-by-one, University Vice Chancellors began to distance themselves from the UUK and attempted to cast blame on the disproportionate weight of Oxbridge colleges in UUK voting. Some Vice Chancellors openly supported the strikers, with some even joining picket lines at their own institutions[8], although this ‘support’ was still accompanied by attempts to intimidate workers behind the scenes by HR departments[9].

UUK’s point-blank refusal to back down vanished and suddenly the UCU and UUK were negotiating again and a deal was announced. The ‘deal’ offered the retention of some benefits at the cost of a significant increase in contributions, plus a commitment to a revaluation of the fund.

The mood on the picket line was angry. After launching one of the biggest, most high profile strikes in recent history and the biggest ever in the sector, the employers’ front disintegrating, this was the best that the union could get? Adding to the resentment was the fact that the union had circulated the offer without a recommendation, with many feeling completely unequipped to make a decision about a complex financial product most barely understood.

There was a lot of heated, but good-natured discussion on the picket. A minority supported the deal, and there was a lot of conversation about the way the union hierarchy appeared to have betrayed the strikers. There was also discussion as to how decisions were taken in the union, but although there was significant resentment against the leadership, no explicit anti-union critique emerged.

This didn’t stop anger solidifying into a Twitter campaign around the hashtag #nocapitulation. The next day of pickets was massive, even larger than those at the beginning. One-by-one branches around the country announced their rejection of the deal and within 24 hours it was dead in the water.

The strikes continued with, on the one hand a sense of victory in having beaten back the proposal, but also an underlying sense of worry of what would come next.

Victory, stalemate or defeat?

As the strikes ended, new negotiations were announced with the threat of another wave to come in May.

Very quickly, a new proposal was agreed between the UCU and UUK. The main thrust of this new agreement was a suspension of the attack on benefits in order for a new valuation of the pension to take place over the next couple of years, by an expert panel with more involvement from the union.

The proposal was put to ballot with a recommendation to accept, with a majority of 64% voting to accept.

At first glance, this looks like a victory, if only a temporary or partial one. After all, the attack has been pushed back. But there has been no agreement whatsoever to preserve current benefits or prevent a rise in contributions and, indeed, the union explicitly stated that any attempt to get guarantees on this (a “no detriment” agreement) was “unrealistic”. Everything now depends on the assessment that the newly appointed valuation panel makes concerning the health of the pension scheme.

Workers are now faced with the potential of having to go through the same struggle again a year or two down the line. And this time, the employers (or the union) won’t be caught by surprise at the strength of the struggle.

Weaknesses in the struggle and lessons for the next

Despite the high participation represented by both the large pickets and the surge in members of the UCU, the strikers were still in a minority. Most of the support workers went into work, even those who had been called out, and around half the academics. Although there were isolated incidences of other workers not crossing the picket line (Birkbeck library was disrupted by a brief action from UNISON members), there doesn’t seem to have been a real dynamic for the struggle to extend to other workers.

In many ways, the stronger-than-expected turnout and its accompanying euphoria was itself a factor in damaging the struggle. While on the positive side it imbued the strikers with a much-needed burst of confidence, it also worked to prevent a self-critical spirit emerging. The electrifying strength of the struggle prevented many from seeing the inherent weakness in its lack of extension.

The debatable victory may also lead to the illusion that actions of this kind have an inherent strength. As discussed, the sheer length of the action will result in a significant financial loss for the most militant workers. It is essentially a strategy around a war of attrition – a struggle that, in the end, the workers will always lose. It’s almost certain that the prospect of another 14 days of lost wages weighed heavily on the minds of many union members when they voted to accept the deal.

The only way for workers to overcome this inherent disadvantage is to spread the struggle. Had the struggle brought in other University workers, far more pressure could have been brought to bear on the bosses.

Understanding the role of the unions

Using the anger of more militant workers in the union, the left have launched a campaign to get Sally Hunt (UCU General Secretary) out of office by staging votes of no confidence.

This strategy enables the ruling class to frame the conflict between workers and union as a conflict between the grassroots and the leadership. Defeats are thus the consequence of betrayal by union leaders, not the fundamental conditions of capitalism today and the way they have made unions tools of capital rather than labour.

By channelling the struggle around the valuation of the pension fund and whether the cuts were really necessary the unions disguise the real nature of the conflict. Firstly, arguing that the fund has been badly managed deflects from the fact that pension schemes everywhere are under attack. The fact that this phenomenon is so widespread shows that it stems from something systemic, not a local problem of incompetent management.

By making workers a partner (through ‘their’ union) in valuing the fund, the union creates the illusion of some sort of joint interest between workers and the bosses. It also implies that workers should accept these valuations (when competently done, of course) as somehow objective. And that they should submit to them just as they must submit to pay cuts, job losses, etc. which result from the headwinds of the capitalist economy. These economic or financial difficulties are presented as unavoidable, no different from a natural disaster such as a bad harvest.

There is a kernel of truth hidden within this ideological attack. As the capitalist system continues its historic decline, it finds it vital to increase exploitation to ever more intolerable levels. This relentless assault is, for capitalism, systemic, inevitable and, above all, necessary. This inexorable decline is also the root of the profound economic and spiritual degeneration of working class life that was the core motivator behind the strike.

However, while austerity is necessary for capitalism, capitalism is not necessary for the working class or the wider masses of humanity. The laws that govern it are not natural but the product of human action. The solidarity workers and students have experienced in this struggle has provided the glimpse of a different way of life, the possibility of a different world. Even in a conservative, limited struggle the fundamental communist nature of the working class shows itself in embryonic form – a nature diametrically opposed to capitalism.

The role of the unions in this process is to make this degeneration acceptable to the workers, and where struggle is inevitable to contain struggles in non-threatening forms. Above all, they work to prevent the communist potential of the working class from flowering. They preach solidarity while advising workers to cross picket lines, they preach struggle while telling workers this is the best you’re going to get. This is sometimes difficult to see, especially when working class confidence is low and the unions appear to be the organisers and motive force of the struggle. As workers develop their struggles they will more-and-more find themselves in direct conflict, not only with the union leadership but the union framework itself.

At present, this fundamental conflict is expressed as an opposition between base and leadership. Harnessing this anger, the leftists demand the resignation of Sally Hunt while simultaneously calling on workers to “build the union”.

As workers develop their struggles and particularly once they adopt the most important need of any strike – to spread the struggle – this conflict will be expressed in a more and more open form. Against the unions, “in order to advance its combat, the working class has to unify its struggles, taking charge of their extension and organisation through sovereign general assemblies and committees of delegates elected and revocable at any time by these assemblies”[10].  

Demogorgon 19/5/18

 

The two articles published in World Revolution 380 are part of a broader project aimed at re-examining the authentic legacy of the events of May-June 1968 in France. The article ‘Sinking into the economic crisis’ takes us back to a document written by the newly-formed group Révolution Internationale in 1969, a polemic against the Situationist thesis that the events were a response to a capitalist system that was “working well”. RI’s article insisted that the struggles of 68 were in fact the first reaction of the working class to the resurfacing of the world economic crisis – and our more recent article concludes that this argument has been amply confirmed over the past fifty years. This will be followed by further articles assessing the predictions we have made about the evolution of the class struggle since 1968, and looking at the development of the revolutionary movement over this period.

The second article in this issue, ‘Against the lies about May 68’, also written by our comrades in France, takes up some of the principal distortions and outright lies being spread about the meaning of May '68: that it was something specifically French, that it was essentially a student rebellion, that its main legacy is in contemporary identity politics, or that it was just something that happened a long time ago with no relevance for today.

A brief consideration of some recent attempts to deal with May 68 in the British media confirms that these are indeed the main mystifications about May 68. We are not talking about the lamentations of the right who bewail the permissive spirit of the 60s for destroying traditional values, or of liberals like Polly Toynbee who moaned that “out of all this revolution against ‘the system’ came a ‘me’ individualism that grew into neo-liberalism”[1]. We are talking about articles and a TV programme that proclaim a certain sympathy with the mood of revolt that swept through France in 1968, display a level of sophistication in their knowledge of what happened and who was involved, but that, in the end, remain firmly inside the standpoint of bourgeois politics and sociology.

For example: both the BBC TV programme ‘Vive la Révolution’, presented by Joan Bakewell[2], and the Guardian article by John Harris, ‘May 1968: the revolution retains its magnetic allure’[3] do not simply repeat the banal idea that May 68 was a student revolt and little more. Both point out that it was the massive involvement of the working class which provoked a situation of national crisis. It’s true that Bakewell’s programme reinforces the idea of something specifically French because, while it deals with student and civil rights protests in other countries at the time, it says nothing at all about the powerful international wave of working class struggles which followed on from the movement in France. By contrast, the article by John Harris, which focuses more on cultural and historical works dealing with May 68 in retrospect, talks about the Italian workers’ struggles of 1969, the so-called ‘Hot Autumn’, which is the subject of a novel by Nanni Balestrini, We want everything, written in 1971 but only published in English in 2014. As the title suggests, and as Harris notes, the novel shows that the Italian Hot Autumn echoed the profound desire for social transformation that was such an important component of the French events. Also noteworthy is that both Bakewell and Harris deal with the Situationists, who, whatever their faults, did give voice to the renewed revolutionary hopes of that era. Harris in particular is of the view that the Situationist concept of the Spectacle – and the related slogan, “Are you consumers or participants” – retain their vitality in today’s world of obsessive consumerism, Facebook and fake news.

And yet we are also informed by Harris that the true heirs of the Situationists and other radicals can be found in the Momentum movement inside Corbyn’s Labour Party – an example of something the Situationists understood rather well: recuperation, the channelling of radicalism and revolt into the existing institutions of bourgeois society, just as the movement in 68 was derailed onto the trap of democratic elections, and so many of its most dynamic elements were sucked up into the political groups of capitalism’s extreme left.

It is also striking that Bakewell, Harris and also David Edgar in ‘The radical legacy of 1968 is under attack. We must defend it’[4] agree that the feminist movement – and identity-based politics in general – are a palpable, enduring legacy of the revolt of May 68. And of course, there is a grain of truth in this: as the article ‘Against the lies about May 68’ points out, every serious proletarian movement has indeed posed the question of the oppression of women and the necessity to overcome it through the unification of the class and the future unification of humanity. The same goes for all other forms of oppression - sexual, racial, national...and all these oppressions were indeed called into question in the animated debates that sprang up everywhere during the wave of working class struggles of the late 60s and early 70s. But the idea of a specific “women’s movement” independent of class is something different, since it acts not for the unification of the proletariat but for its internal fragmentation and its dissolution into cross-class alliances. In today’s period where the working class is experiencing profound difficulties in forging a sense of itself as a class, the growth of identity politics threatens to further exacerbate this tendency towards fragmentation and dissolution.

In this sense, the true legacy of 1968 is indeed less obvious and less spectacular: it can be found in the small milieu of authentically revolutionary, communist organisations, in various forums of discussion about the class struggle and the problem of revolution, but also, now and again, in much more massive movements which give rise to the same kind of searching, reflection and discussion that we saw in the occupied faculties and factories of May-June 68: movements like the 2006 students struggle in France, or the Indignados movement in Spain in 2011, which are not mere pale echoes of May 68, but which point the way to the revolution of the future.   Amos 19/5/18

 

Seventy years of the National Health Service, founded in 1948, has been celebrated on TV, by a service at Westminster Abbey, and by numerous events in hospitals. The NHS is, in its own words, “our country’s most trusted and respected social institution”[1]. Even those who protest at the way it is run do so because they are against “the assault on the NHS” (Socialist Worker 3/3/18).  People love the NHS, and want to protect it. It all seems too good to be true, a national institution loved by all from the Countess of Wessex at the service in Westminster Abbey (even if royalty invariably use private hospitals) to the poorest in the land, and from right to extreme left of the political spectrum. This ideology, supported by all the bourgeoisie’s political forces, is based on many falsehoods.

The NHS lends itself to this ideological celebration partly because it offers medical treatment, often free at the point of use. There are many who are alive today because of that medical treatment. Also most NHS employees love their jobs caring for patients. These reactions are often translated into the idea that “I love the NHS”, especially by workers on strike and those aiming to support them. This confuses the NHS as a capitalist institution carried out by the state on behalf of the economy, judged in terms of monetary value, and the work that goes on in health care judged according to the human needs it fulfils. It is also, no doubt, a better poster institution than sewage and waterworks which are equally necessary to our health and life expectancy.

The circumstances of the formation of the NHS

The NHS is often presented as a gain won by the working class through the Attlee Labour government of 1945. Or perhaps “I thought that after the war the bourgeoisie introduced [the NHS and the welfare state] because they were scared of the threat of revolution and the influence of communist ideas, and all the returning soldiers were a real threat to the “social order”.[2] However, the working class was still defeated at the end of the Second World War. The Great War of 1914-18 was characterised by fraternisation on both the Western and Eastern fronts and ended by the start of the German revolution 100 years ago, following the Russian revolution in 1917. However the revolutionary wave was defeated, ushering in a period of counter-revolution and freeing the bourgeoisie to unleash the barbarism of the 1930s and 1940s. Class struggles never completely stop in capitalism, and there were limited strike movements even in the dark days of the war, notably in Italy in 1943, but the fact that the whole war could be conducted and brought to a successful conclusion without a commensurate reaction by the working class showed that it remained defeated. Not only was the working class in no condition to force the ruling class to grant reforms, but capitalism had entered its phase of war and revolution, its decadence, when it was no longer in a position to grant meaningful, lasting reforms to the whole class.

It is true that the ruling class was well aware of the danger the working class had represented at the end of the previous war, and it certainly acted to head off undeniable discontent toward the end of the Second World War. One example is the carpet bombing of civilian areas during the war, the better to pre-emptively massacre proletarians. Another was for advancing Allied forces to hang back and allow the German army to put down any resistance before entering. This was the meaning of Churchill’s idea of letting the “Italians … stew in their own juice”, i.e. let Germany put down the workers in 1943, or the Russian Army standing aside to enable the crushing of the Warsaw Uprising of 1944. To the extent that the establishment of the NHS and the welfare state responded to this fear of the working class they did so by making workers feel loyalty towards and dependence on the state rather than their own capacity for struggle and solidarity. Discontent was also channelled into support for the Labour Party, although the Conservative Manifesto of 1945 shows they were not backward in advocating a “comprehensive health service” where “no one will be denied the attention, the treatment or the appliances he requires because he cannot afford them.”

The introduction of the NHS was certainly related to war. The British state had first become aware of the need to improve the health of the working class at the time of the Boer War when so many volunteers were unfit for military service.[3] In fact the NHS and the welfare state were as much the product of the wartime coalition as the Labour government. The 1945 election was won by Attlee who had been the deputy Prime Minister in the Coalition which had overseen the preparation of these policies. The 1944 Education Act extending secondary education was carried out by the Coalition. The NHS and welfare state were based on the Beveridge Report, by a Liberal economist, harking back to ideas put forward by Lloyd George before the First World War, and another Liberal economist, Keynes, was responsible for the ideas of full employment and state stimulation of the economy.[4] It was also part of a process of nationalisation (Bank of England, mines, railways, iron and steel…) which, although not supported by the Tories, followed on from the years of state direction of the economy during the war.

Even before privatisation

One of the ideas given for defending the NHS is that the real problem is privatisation. After all we don’t see people going round saying “I love BUPA”, even when some people have private health as part of their pay, nor even “I love Medicaid”. However, we should see what Beveridge said was intended by the welfare state: “The plan is not one for giving to everybody something for nothing and without trouble, or something that will free the recipients for ever thereafter from personal responsibilities. The plan is one to secure income for subsistence on condition of service and contribution and in order to make and keep men fit for service.” From the horse’s mouth you have it, the NHS is to keep workers “fit for service”, in work or in the military.

It was always the proud boast that in the UK we do not look for evidence of insurance before giving treatment, like they do in the USA. But the NHS has always been a compulsory, universal, National Insurance. Long before ‘privatisation’ this was demonstrated by a British national living in the USA without health insurance who returned in the hope of getting treatment for terminal cancer, only to be faced with a bill for her treatment in an NHS hospital because she was not insured here. She returned to the USA where she was entitled to Medicaid. This kind of thing has become much more systematic with campaigns against “health tourism”, guidelines about who can and cannot be treated on the NHS, and the “hostile environment” for immigrants which requires health services to scrutinise each patient’s right to treatment, or otherwise. But the principle remains.

Before ‘privatisation’ money was already a major concern in running the NHS, in particular a concern to keep costs down. There was always a long waiting list for treatment. The number of beds was steadily reduced. GP surgeries, always run as small businesses, were often in an atrocious condition. It was no golden age. ‘Privatisation’, integrating more private money and private health facilities into the NHS, has gone along with greater state control: targets, regular inspections, pressure to amalgamate small GP premises into more cost-effective businesses, guidelines to direct which medications and treatments can be used, all in the interest of moving more care out of hospitals, which are expensive, into “the community”.

State capitalism and the social wage

We have seen that the NHS was part of a wave of nationalisation by the post-war Attlee government, and that this followed on from the state direction of the economy, including health services, during the war. We have also seen that the need to have men fit for military service was what first prompted the ruling class to take an interest in improving the health of the working class. This is no accident, state capitalism itself is an aspect of the adaptation to a system of imperialism and war, or at least preparation for war. Left to itself and the control of the market, capital concentrates, often into huge multinational concerns that dwarf many small nations. State capitalism concentrates at a state level for political and military reasons, typically supporting or taking over loss-making industries necessary to the national economy, and typically this has been developed particularly around a war effort.

“The wage itself has been integrated into the state. Fixing wages at their capitalist value has devolved upon the state organs. Part of the workers’ wages is directly levied and administered by the state. Thus the state ‘takes charge’ of the life of the worker, controls his health (as part of the struggle against absenteeism) and directs his leisure (for purposes of ideological repression).”[5] The unions have been integrated into the state, and the state regulates minimum wages, and also takes over paying an aspect of wages, for instance with tax credit (or the universal credit to be brought in) and housing benefit that subsidise the wages paid by capital. The NHS is also an aspect of this.

The ideology of the NHS and welfare state as taking care of its citizens is very dangerous. Workers are encouraged to identify with those parts of the state that appear to benefit them, such as the NHS, and through this to humanise the state and identify with it as a good citizen. We should forget that it is imperialist, forget its involvement in various military adventures, forget its repressive role. This identification can also be used to sow divisions in the working class, the idea that the benefits are for the good citizens that have already contributed and should be denied to immigrants who have only recently arrived.

With this identification with the NHS, and through that with the state, we would be led to imagine that it can be induced to act in our interests if only we campaign hard enough or vote for the right people. In reality the state belongs to the ruling class and runs its imperialist war machine.  Alex 8/9/18

 

Ever since the UK’s Referendum of June 2016 the British bourgeoisie has been in a turmoil of division and instability. For generations identified as an experienced and skilful manipulator of the social situation, the British bourgeoisie, in the form of the Cameron government, made a fundamental mistake when, in trying to take the steam out of increasing populism, it called a referendum which resulted in a vote to leave the EU.

This was followed by a further error in 2017 when Theresa May called an election to strengthen the government’s position which ended with the Tories in a weaker position, dependent on the loyalist DUP. Since then negotiations with the EU, in as much as it’s possible to read between the lines, have, unsurprisingly, not appeared to have favoured the UK. And when, in July 2018, the Cabinet agreed the Chequers statement on the UK’s future relationship with the EU, it led to the resignations of Boris Johnson and David Davies, and general acknowledgement that divisions continued throughout the Conservative Party.

While May’s version of Brexit is not acclaimed, with even her Chancellor, Philip Hammond, disagreeing on the implications of ‘no deal’ for the British economy, there is not any coherent ‘hard Brexit’ alternative being offered, except the perspective of crashing out of the EU without an agreed deal. Jacob Rees-Mogg says it might be 50 years for the benefits of Brexit to be felt. Nigel Farage insisted that “I never said it would be a beneficial thing to leave and everyone would be better off,” – which, of course, he did - “just that we would be self-governing.” Boris Johnson is reported to have said “Fuck business”, a rather nihilistic response for a leading figure in a major capitalist party. To be fair to Johnson and Davies, they have both, since before the Referendum, been advocates of establishing the same sort of relationship with the EU as Canada has. The EU/Canada negotiations took 7 years or more and produced a 1600-page text of agreement. Whatever its merits, it’s not an option that’s currently on the table. In reality the Brexiters can only offer ‘no deal’.

At a time when a government is in disarray you would normally expect the opposition to be profiting from the situation. This is far from the case as the Labour Party has little to offer on the question of leaving EU while it expends increasing energy on accusations of antisemitism in its ranks. These accusations, based on the real racism and antisemitism in the Labour Party (not unusual in what is after all a party of capital) might have first been used as a means of putting pressure on Jeremy Corbyn, but have escalated into a cycle of claim and counter-claim which show the intensity of the divisions in the Labour Party and make it look a lot less likely prospect for government.

The option offered by Tony Blair and other Remainers of a second referendum appears to be based on a hopeless desire to turn back the clock to the time before the last referendum. A 4-million-signature petition has already been rejected by parliament, and the campaign seems to be based mainly on alarm at all the varieties of Brexit on offer. Labour says it would prefer a general election, which is what opposition parties are supposed to say.

Different responses to the growth of populism

Populism is an international phenomenon. Across the globe, with the experience of the effects of the economic crisis and a sense of powerlessness in the face of the impersonal force of globalised capitalism, the expression of anger and despair takes many forms. Dissatisfied by what mainstream parties offer there is a turning against potential scapegoats. “It’s all the fault of a metropolitan elite”. “Blame the bankers”. “Things wouldn’t be the way they are if it wasn’t for immigrants/refugees/Muslims”. “It’s all down to the Brussels bureaucrats”.  This is a product of the decomposition of capitalism. The major bourgeois parties have nothing to offer. On the other hand, with a historically low level of workers’ struggle, the proletarian alternative appears absent. This is the basis for the growth of populism.

There is not a specific policy or set of policies that characterises populism and in different countries the bourgeoisie’s established parties have responded in a number of ways to the development of populism. In the US, Trump was a candidate for a traditional party but with a populist agenda. He has criticised NATO and the CIA despite them being cornerstones of American imperialist policy, criticised the World Trade Organisation despite the role it plays for American capitalism, and flirts with Putin regardless of the machinations of Russian imperialism. Against this, his bourgeois opponents are finding that conventional politicking has little effect. They can call Trump a liar, investigate Russia’s role in the 2016 Presidential Election, look at the implications of hush money paid to various women, and speculate on the possibilities of an eventual impeachment. Trump is criticised by his bourgeois rivals for acting irresponsibly, but the introduction of trade tariffs, expulsion or barring of immigrants, and increased investment in US militarism, are all policies that have been pursued by others in defence of the interests of American national capital. They obey a definite logic in a world where “every man for himself” has been the dominant tendency since the break up of the blocs at the end of the 1980s.

In France the response to populism took a different form. Marine Le Pen’s Front National was a known force in French politics, but none of the established parties could produce a candidate who could have convincingly have taken her on. Investment banker Emmanuel Macron’s En Marche was created in 2016 in order to confront the populist forces represented by Le Pen. Macron’s victory in the May 2017 election for the French Presidency was a success for the French bourgeoisie. However, it is not clear how long-term this success will be sustained as the social situation that gives rise to populism still persists.

In Italy this year, after three months of negotiations following inconclusive elections, there emerged a coalition government of the League and 5-Star movement. Both of these populist parties, with very different policies, had made much of their opposition to the main established political parties. The League was for the expulsion of immigrants and more police on the streets. 5-Star, with more following in the poorer South of Italy, proposed reductions in the cost of living and a “minimum payment for the citizen”. In government they have followed up on their promises to attack migrants and immigration, but not so much on economic promises so far. With a certain scepticism towards the EU there is evidence that they will add further instability to the situation in Europe.

This is the global context for what’s happening with the British bourgeoisie. Specifically, the 2016 Referendum was an attempt to head off populism that failed. This failure has meant that Tories have had to pursue Brexit, which, along with anti-immigrant policies, is one of the centrepieces of populism, despite many of them having campaigned to stay in the EU. All the predictions of economic disaster remain in place, to which have been added talk of the need to stockpile food and medicines, warnings of the possibilities of social unrest, and forecasts of the implications for travel, trade, security and terrorism. If there have been some exaggerations in these prognostications – and predictions of doom have characterised the Remain camp –its aim has been to put pressure on the Brexiters to compromise. Two years after the Referendum the UK bourgeoisie is in a weaker position, more divided, and the possibility of a neat, orderly departure from the EU seems remote.

Divisions in the British bourgeoisie over Europe are nothing new. Back in the 1950s and 60s, before the UK joined the EEC in 1972, there were opponents of European integration in both Labour and Tory parties. The Referendum of 1975 strengthened the position of the pro-Europeans, but it did not mean that the divisions had gone away. The removal of Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher in 1990, for example, despite her agreement to the European Exchange Rate Mechanism and the single European market, demonstrated that the dominant faction of the British bourgeoisie could tolerate only so many anti-European harangues. But, while the length and depth of divisions over Europe should not be underestimated, they have been exacerbated within decomposing capitalism by the rise of populism. This is an active factor in the situation that has contributed to the growing disarray in the British bourgeoisie. It’s a mess that doesn’t serve the interests of the British national capital.

At the Europe-wide level the threat of fragmentation is also growing. It’s not only in Italy that there are, to put it mildly, calls to re-assess national relations with the EU – there is also scepticism in Greece, Hungary and elsewhere in eastern Europe. For US capitalism there are economic advantages in a fragmented Europe: it’s a logical consequence of the end of imperialist blocs, and a part of the bourgeoisie around Trump is convinced that the US can make deals with countries separately. Russian imperialism is definitely in favour of undermining the unity of the EU, principally for military-strategic reasons. On the other hand, German economic interests are not served at all by the fragmentation of the European market, and as for Chinese capitalism, its globalisation policy requires a more open world market rather than a return to national protectionism.

So, the problems of the British bourgeoisie, whether the UK leaves with a deal that will satisfy no one, or, in the case of no deal, falls off a cliff into uncharted waters, have to be seen in the international context of decomposing capitalism. None of the capitalist options on offer, whether by traditional parties or populist parties, whether in or out of the EU, can benefit the working class in any way. For the international working class the path of conscious struggle is the only route out of the horrors and deprivations of capitalism.  Car 8/9/18

The summer of 2018 has produced the hottest ever recorded temperatures across the northern hemisphere, and across 4 continents with an untold number of people dead as a consequence. Canada had an all-time record of 36℃ and 18 days that exceeded 30℃ with many deaths reported, Texas had 10 continual days of between 39-44℃, Algeria recorded 51℃, said to be a record for the continent of Africa. Tokyo, Japan had 41 ℃ with over one hundred people dead and many hospitalised; South Korea had its hottest temperatures too. In Europe Stockholm had it hottest July since records began and Sodankyla, a town in Finnish Lapland just north of the Arctic Circle, recorded a temperature of 32.1℃, 12℃ warmer than typical for the month. Quriyat in Oman baked under a minimum temperature of 42.6℃ for a whole 24 hours at the beginning of July. In the southern hemisphere parts of Australia have experienced serious drought for a couple of months. There has been disruption to industry and farming.

There have been some horrendous fires. There were said to be at one time as many as 16 individual fires burning on the west coast of the US, with several people, including 4 firemen killed; the holiday resort of Mati, near Athens, was almost completely destroyed by wildfires where at least 80 people died, trapped in homes and cars, unable to escape to the sea. Wildfires in Sweden devastated land as far north as the Arctic Circle, said to be an area the equivalent of 900 football pitches; some 80,000 hectares of forest were burning in Siberia. In Britain too, the hot dry weather which started back in the Spring, as in several other European countries, has given rise to parched gardens and grasslands with farmers using their winter food stocks to feed their animals. There have also been fires across some of the peat-filled moorlands in the north of the country that have been difficult to bring under control because they continued burning to a depth of one metre or more.

A strong factor in this heatwave has been the weak and unusual course of the Jet Stream, which is normally a key agent in steering the weather patterns across the globe. The recent Jet Stream has been extremely weak and has been in a position well to the north of the UK; this allowed widespread high pressure to persist for longer over many places. In addition there have been substantial changes to sea surface temperatures in the North Atlantic. “These are part of a phenomenon known as the Atlantic multidecadal oscillation,” said Professor Adam Scaife, of the Met Office, “in fact, the situation is very like the one we had in 1976, when we had similar ocean temperatures in the Atlantic and an unchanging jet stream that left great areas of high pressure over many areas for long periods, and of course, that year we had one of the driest, sunniest and warmest summers in the UK in the 20th century.” (Guardian, 22/7/18). But since 1976 there have been several decades of global warming - caused by the rising volumes of carbon emissions - adding to global temperatures. Consequently there is more residual heat absorbed in land and sea. We are also seeing a warming of the ice-caps. On August 22nd, the Guardian reported “The oldest and thickest sea ice in the Arctic has started to break up, opening waters north of Greenland that are normally frozen, even in summer. This phenomenon - which has never been recorded before - has occurred twice this year owing to warm winds and a climate-change driven heatwave in the northern hemisphere”.

The extreme weather isn’t just a case of excessive temperatures. There have been some storms and flash flooding too. On August 3rd across parts of America’s east coast 49 million people “were under flash flood watch” from Maine to the Carolinas; Japan had heavy flooding on its west coast, prior to its heatwave; in the Indian state of Kerala the worse monsoon floods in a century have killed 341 people since May, 191 of them since August 8th, mainly through landslides; 220,000 people were forced to flee their homes.

While the evidence of rising global temperatures and increased global warming is increasingly beyond dispute, the climatic characteristics do not follow a linear pattern. There are certain variables like the effect of El Nino, a strong weather front that brings extreme weather from the source of the Pacific Ocean. It was largely due to El Nino that 2016 was the hottest year on record at the time but the previous El Nino of a similar intensity was back in 1998. However, of the top ten hottest years on record, nine were this century, the other is 1998. According to Sybren Drifhout, professor of physical geography and climate physics at Southampton University, there has been a lapse in global warming at the beginning of the 21st century, a phenomenon known as “global warming hiatus” (despite this, the summer heatwave of 2003 across Europe was responsible for thousands of deaths, mainly the elderly), while agreeing the evidence points to an increased likelihood of a recurrence of hot summers. His predictions are that heatwaves will now become more frequent: “if (our) new predictions are correct, we are heading for a less benign phase where natural forces amplify the affects of man-made climate change.” (The Times, 15/08/18). The new forecast from an international team including the researchers of Southampton University suggests there is “a 58% chance that the Earth’s overall temperature from 2018 through 2022 would be anomalously warm, and a 69% chance that the oceans would be” (ibid).

Nasa (the US space agency) says that the past four years have been the four warmest years on record. The US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) in its 2017 annual report on environment statistics said that it was the warmest ‘non El Nino’ year on record, that sea levels reached an all-time high, that both poles saw a record low ice and it was the most active hurricane season since 2005, with the US suffering 16 major disasters with a total combined financial losses of over $300 billion. Much of this is the result of the three powerful hurricanes, Harvey, Irma and Maria that inflicted heavy damage on various parts of the US, Houston, Florida and Puerto Rico respectively. And it is warmer oceans that trigger more violent hurricanes. Previously 64 lives were said to have been lost on Puerto Rico, but a recent report from the University of Washington said it was almost 3,000, more than the lives lost with Hurricane Katrina back in 2005. The figures were made worse owing to the US government’s lack of response to the needs of the islanders.

Capitalism doesn’t have the answer

For the last 30 years there have been reports and international conferences on global warming, expressing the growing concern of the ruling class, but at the same time designed to make us believe that something is being done to deflect the planet from the catastrophic course ahead. An Intergovernmental Commission on Climate Change (IPCC) was set up in 1990 by the United Nations and the World Meteorological Organisation with a brief to monitor the ongoing situation and to come up with strategies. It helped draw up the Kyoto Protocol which set the developed countries targets in reducing their greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions; this process of monitoring continued up to 2012 with the USA and Australia opting out. ‘Developing’ countries, such as India or China, were not expected to comply since they needed time to grow their economies; the issue of the environment was secondary. So it was full speed ahead for China: “In 2007 China overtook the US as the world’s biggest emitter of greenhouse gases because it was so dependent on this fossil fuel (i.e. coal). For each unit of energy, coal produces 80 per cent more carbon dioxide than natural gas, and 20 per cent more than oil. This does not even include the methane released from mines, for which China accounts for almost half the global total, or spontaneous combustion of coal seams, which burns 100 megatons of coal each year..(...) For another two decades China would be trapped in a coal-dependent economy (...) ‘Even if China utilises every kind of energy to the maximum level, it is difficult for us to produce enough energy for economic development. It is not a case of choosing coal or renewables. We need both’, the senior scientist said.”  (Jonathan Watts, When a billion Chinese jump, 2010)

This apparent “half-hearted” approach in response to climate change, even from politicians who recognise the danger of climate change, shows that demanding that capitalism limit global warming in effect means demanding that capitalism cease to be capitalism. While the Stern report in 2006 points to the ‘economic sense’ of cutting GHGs, capitalism is not a unified system based on what makes sense for humanity as a whole, but a system of competing national interests where the only economic sense is based on the short-term and short-sighted interests of the national capital. In fact Stern demonstrated precisely why capitalism is failing to respond to the problem: he is all for recommending constrains on GHG emissions “except where such restraints would lead to a significant decline in economic growth (capital accumulation)” (quoted in The Ecological Rift, John Bellamy Foster, Brett Clark and Richard York). For capital, and its political representatives, sustainable development means sustainable capital accumulation in terms of profit, regardless of whether this is harmful or dangerous to human beings in the short (air pollution), medium or long term (climate change).

Global warming is considered to have increased temperatures by over 1℃ over the last 100 years of industrialisation. Realistic predictions for future global temperatures talk of an increase by as much as 5℃ by the end of the century, with the full knowledge of the horrors this would bring. We should stress that the most harm in the future will be inflicted on the poorest countries and their citizens. They are the most vulnerable to climate change. They have fewer resources to combat the devastating storms, the floods, the rising sea levels, the heat and the droughts, the occurrence of these extreme weather conditions. Back in 2009 we highlighted this: “A report made public by the World Humanitarian Forum’, (...) re-evaluates the effects of climate change. Because it’s not only a very serious threat for the future, with 250 million ‘climate refugees’ predicted by 2050, but also a major contemporary crisis which is already killing 300,000 people a year around the world. More than half of the 300,000 deaths are the result of malnutrition. Then come the health problems, because global warming serves to propagate numerous diseases. Thus, 10 million new cases of malaria, resulting in 55,000 deaths, have been identified. These victims join the 3 million people who die each year from this disease. Here again the populations of the poorer countries are the most affected because they are the last to have access to the necessary medicines. The rise in temperatures attested by all serious scientists has a direct impact on agricultural yields and access to water, and this again hits the poor first and foremost. (see WR 326, ‘Global warming: capitalism kills’). So the countries with the lowest GHG emissions that will suffer the most from climate change are those with least capacity to affect any change at a global, international level.

The Economist magazine has produced its own despondent assessment: “Three years after countries vowed in Paris to keep warming ‘well below’ 2℃ relative to pre-industrial levels, greenhouse gas emissions are up again. So are investments in oil and gas. In 2017 for the first time in 4 years, demand for coal rose. Subsidies for renewables such as wind and solar power are dwindling in many places and investment has stalled; climate-friendly nuclear power is expensive and unpopular. It is tempting to think that these are temporary set-backs and that mankind, with its instincts for self-preservation, will muddle through to a victory over global warming. In fact, it is losing the war ...” (The Economist, ‘The world is losing the war against climate change’ 04/08/18). In fact it is very easy for journalists at The Economist or elsewhere to show how bad things are, and what investors or politicians should do, although we have seen that it cannot be effective within capitalism. But what we need to say about Trump’s decision to leave the Paris deal is this: the danger is not that it will prevent the USA carrying out the measures required, but that he will fool us into thinking that by comparison Democratic politicians, or the countries still holding to the Paris accords, are doing something more than “greenwashing” the real problem.

Capitalism is driving the world towards disaster, reflecting its blind and destructive impulses and its historical bankruptcy. This leopard cannot change its spots or its course. This is why movements and organisations that think it is possible to make the capitalist system peace-loving, rational and sensitive to humanity’s needs are peddling illusions. The working class struggle will more and more need to take up the question of mankind’s relationship with the natural world, because it is the only force that can bring the juggernaut of capitalist accumulation to a halt and unite humanity in a common purpose. Duffy,  07/09/18

 

“President Trump said Friday that tariffs on another $267 billion in Chinese goods are ready to go and could be rolled out on short notice, reinforcing earlier threats and signaling no end in sight for the growing trade dispute. Speaking aboard Air Force One en route to Fargo, N.D., Mr. Trump said the tariffs would be in addition to the tariffs on $200 billion in Chinese goods the administration has been preparing, which he said will ‘take place very soon, depending on what happens.’” Wall Street Journal, 8/9/18.

On the same page you can watch a video speculating on how the Chinese might hit back[1]. The Trump administration has also announced severe tariffs on imports from the EU – described by Trump on his recent European visit as a “foe” – and even from its neighbours and partners in the so-called North American Free Trade Agreement, Mexico and Canada.

The spectre of an accelerating trade war is haunting capitalism. It may seem difficult to understand in a period where production has never been so global and the “free movement of capital and labour” has been an almost unassailable credo of the world’s leading politicians and economists for decades. But it is precisely the inherent contradiction between capital’s thrust towards conquering the globe, and the inhibiting framework of the nation state, which is behind this new surge of protectionism. 

Global v national: an insurmountable contradiction

In the Grundrisse Marx provides us with a key to grasping why the nation state,  as a political expression of capitalist social relations, must itself become a fetter on the global development of the productive forces: “the universality towards which it (i.e. capital) irresistibly strives encounters barriers in its own nature, which will, at a certain stage of its development, allow it to be recognised as being itself the greatest barrier to this tendency, and hence will drive towards its own overcoming”[2]. In 1916, in the wake of the clearest possible expression of this barrier – the first imperialist world war –Trotsky could be more precise: “The nation state has outgrown itself – as a framework for the development of the productive forces, as a basis for class struggle, and especially as the state form of the dictatorship of the proletariat.” (Nashe Slovo, 4 February 1916) 

The very survival of the nation state had become an added element in the growing contradictions of capital at both the economic and military levels

These contradictions have grown sharper over the past 100 years despite all the efforts of the bourgeoisie to contain them. In the 1930s, the protectionist response of the US to the depression, alongside the rise of the fascist and Stalinist siege economies, deepened the world crisis of overproduction by further restricting the global market. Fortunately for the bourgeoisie, but tragically for humanity, capitalism confronted a defeated working class and was able to “solve” the problem through a gigantic military mobilisation and the subsequent reorganisation of the world market. 

The post-1945 world order was, in part, based on the recognition that limits had to be imposed on national competition. Formally this was expressed in the establishment of the United Nations Organisation, but in reality it was the two-bloc system founded on the rule of the bloc leader and the subordination of its allies that lay at the heart of the new order. Since it was aimed at the rival bloc, it contained the permanent threat of nuclear war and endless conflict at the peripheries, but it also ensured a certain discipline in these conflicts; at the same time, combined with Keynesian economic management and real expansion into new areas following the demise of the old empires like Britain and France, it allowed for a certain stability and economic development.

The crisis of this phase of state capitalism manifested itself first at the economic level: “stagflation” and the beginnings of open unemployment towards the end of the 1960s. The critics of what they called “socialism” or the “mixed economy” argued that direct state management obstructed the free operation of market forces (and there was indeed some truth in this, as we noted in our theses on the crisis in the eastern bloc[3]). The new approach pioneered under Thatcher, Reagan etc was called neo-liberalism because it presented itself as a return to 19th century laisser-faire; in reality, as we always insisted, it was a new version of state capitalism (the German term “ordo-liberalism” is perhaps a more honest description) which was directed by a highly repressive central state

The international face of neo-liberalism is “globalisation”, which began to be a common term in the 90s, i.e. following the collapse of the eastern bloc. There is a deep falsehood in this concept, since it is based on the argument that capitalism had only become global once the “socialist” countries had disappeared: in reality, the Stalinist regimes were a particular form of the world capitalist system. Nevertheless, the end of the autarkic model of the eastern bloc countries made a real economic expansion possible: not so much into the old countries of the Russian bloc, but into areas like India, China, South East Asia etc. This expansion had a number of underlying elements: the technological developments that allowed a much faster circulation of capital and a reorganisation of global industrial networks; a more directly economic dimension, in which capital was able to penetrate new extra-capitalist areas and make use of much cheaper labour power, while at the same time making gigantic profits through the swelling of the financial sector; and also a social element, since the break-up of industrial concentrations in the “old” capitalist countries, driven by the hunt for new sources of profit, also had the effect of atomising centres of class militancy.  

The US looks to bail out of its own world order

This new post-Cold War order remained one under the aegis of the US despite the increasing erosion of US domination at the imperialist level, especially around events in the Middle East. International organisms created in the previous period (IMF, World Bank, WTO) survived and were still US-led. Rival trading blocs, in particular the EU, were accepted as necessary by the US.

But this new order also corresponded to the advancing decomposition of capitalist society, creating powerful centrifugal forces that tended to undermine the state and inter-state structures of the ruling class. Decomposition not only pits nation against nation in an increasing free-for-all, but even precipitates the disintegration of nations, starting with the “failed states” at the peripheries but spreading towards the centre (cf the Catalonia crisis in Spain, even the drive towards Scottish independence in the UK). At the political level, these tendencies are the soil for the growth of populism, a form of reaction against the parties and institutions tied to the “neo-liberal” world order which has overseen a massive increase in inequality, the ruin of whole areas of traditional production and a growing inability to deal with the problems posed by the refugee crisis and the terrorist “blowback” in the capitalist centres. These latter phenomena were to a large extent the unwanted results of imperialist wars in the Middle East and elsewhere – in turn the product of the USA’s efforts to preserve its world hegemony through the application of its undisputed military superiority.

At the economic level, the growth of populism can be linked to the financial crash of 2008, which was the first major sign of the limits of the new economic world order with its growing addiction to speculation and debt. The fragility of the “recovery” since 2008 can be gauged by the fact that most of the remedies adopted by the capitalist states have been founded on the same basic policies that led to the crash in the first place: a state supported bail out of the centres of global speculation – the big banks, the printing of money, and an even greater recourse to debt. Even China, which has been presented as the new workshop of the world, a place where real production is the basis of the economy, is now facing a debt crisis which threatens its huge economic and imperialist ambitions. [4]

Thus the rise of populism expresses the attempt to turn away from the “globalised” order and withdraw behind national borders, increasingly combining neo-Keynesian social measures with vicious policies of exclusion. Most of these policies are anathema to the common sense of the mouthpieces of globalisation, as we saw with the reaction of a large panel of economic experts to the latest shots in Trump’s trade war, recalling the lessons learned from the utter failure of similar policies in the 1930s[5].

There have been real counter-attacks to the populist upsurge by those who still uphold the old order (the Macron election, the investigations into Trump in the US, the united response of Europe to Trump’s trade tariffs, etc) but the populist upsurge continues to grow and to have increasing effects on the economic crisis and imperialist conflicts. Trump has had to back-track again and again (on Russia, on China, North Korea, migrants) but his policies are supported by a significant section of the ruling class who want to continue the policy of tax cuts and favours to certain industries, as well as by a “base” kept on board by his culture wars positions, but also by economic bribes (tax bonuses, social programmes, tariffs on foreign goods that raise hopes of reviving jobs in old industries).

The ICC’s June report on imperialist tensions[6] emphasises that we shouldn’t underestimate the method in Trump’s madness, aimed at imposing a situation in which the US is at the very heart of ‘every man for himself’, but including a network of deals and bilateral agreements which aim at pulling apart existing alliances. Yanis Varoufakis, the ex-Syriza economist who now uses his knowledge of Marx to advertise ways of saving capitalism, provides some backing for this argument in a recent article in The Guardian: “Armed with the exorbitant privilege that owning the dollar presses affords him, Trump then takes a look at the trade flows with the rest of the G7 and comes to an inescapable conclusion: he cannot possibly lose a trade war against countries that have such high surpluses with the US (eg Germany, Italy, China), or which (like Canada) will catch pneumonia the moment the American economy catches the common cold”[7].

Furthermore, the capacity of Trump to survive and pursue his methods is giving heart to populist solutions elsewhere, above all in Europe: Britain, Hungary, the Czech Republic, Poland, Austria, Germany, and now Italy. Italy’s new regime above all represents a threat to the euro and the EU itself. Italy’s huge debts can be used as a basis for blackmail because the EU cannot allow Italy’s economy to fail, while an Italian exit would be a huge disaster for the EU; at the same time as a main landing post for the refugee problem its current stance threatens to undermine any unified response to the migrant crisis[8].

This doesn’t mean that the warnings of the “experts” about the dangers inherent in the return to protectionism are ill-founded. Populism is, in part at least, a product of the economic crisis but its policies cannot fail to deepen it – the short term benefits protectionism may bring to this or that national economy will have destructive long term effects on the world system. But neither can the “globalists” create a truly world order since capitalism is irrevocably tied to competition between national units organised around the bourgeois state. The necessity of communism, of a world human community without borders and states, is continually highlighted by the present international crisis, even when the proletariat itself, the bearer of the communist project, seems to be very far from grasping this perspective.   Amos 8/9/18